the truth of things is what’s happening, now

  LEON THOMAS AT THE TIN PALACE

  eye thought it was the music when

  in fact it was a blender

  grinding down ice

  making stuffings for drinks, but then

  you jumped right on in on the downbeat, leon

  stroking rhythm inside time

  inside the bar, then

  people flew deeper into themselves

  became the very air sweeping language to crescendo

  between feathers of touch looping chord changes

  your voice blued down, blues cries, field hollas

  mississippi river flooded guttural

  stitches through your space

  images of collective recall, leon

  your voice strokes scattin’ octaves—

  ice grinding down still inside the blender

  making stuffings for pina coladas—then

  you scooped up our feelings again

  in the shovel of your john henry doowops, leon

  jazzed through ellington, count & bird

  yodeling coltrane, blues cries

  the history of joe williams

  sewn into the eyes of our eardrums

  transmitted to the space between

  the eyes where memory lies

  your scatting licks brings us back dancing

  in our seats, you kick swelling language, inside

  your lungs, voice stroking colors painting

  the Creator’s Masterplan

  as pharoah explodes inside the tone blender of his horn

  the ice grinds down the bar jumps out of itself

  scooped up in the shovel of your john henry doowops

  blue as a mississippi gutteral river flooded

  octaves kicking back black scattin’

  rhythms loop busting your chops

  feather stroking phrasing, leon thomas

  yodeling octaves, sewn back black

  where they came from

  VI.

  UNTITLED 3

  birds ski down the day’s inscrutable smile

  wheeling, banking their diaphanous

  sawblading voices, their sword-like sleek feathers

  cutting through the day’s upper reaches of silence

  their convoluted language cacophonous

  & raucous, as a lynch mob

  in old georgia, the rope-rasping burning of their syllables

  hanging their twisting meanings around us & these blooming

  dark hours stormy with chaos april brings—

  spring leaping suddenly upon us

  like a black panther clawing our breath

  but is filled with so rare & mysterious

  a beauty, it thrills us to death

  EYE THROW MY ROPE TONGUE INTO THE SKY

  eye throw my rope tongue into the sky

  send out words of love lassoing to you cross

  blue valleys of distance

  fight off swirling tornadoes, desert fried

  fools who want to intercept this message for you

  only for you, rain-swept cooing lady, wooing

  tongue of cool rain

  my voice, a wing of stroking feathers

  riffing & riding the hot wires, comes tickling

  your eardrums, my sweet tongue looping

  lyrical melodies of fire

  rope tongue looping melodies cross skies

  comes tickling, sweetly, your eardrums

  A THOUGHT FOR YOU, MARGARET

  for Margaret Porter

  eye stretch my lips, 3000 miles

  cross telephone wires, sucking silence

  of wings beating down breath, space

  a hemorrhage of distance

  & you there singing, as dusktones

  rainbow feathers, sleeping, as loveliness

  peace, we have come to this magic, apart

  with ourselves, alone

  serene, inside this g music

  muted trumpet kissing fabled dusk song

  skin of scarred history, long distant embraces

  in dreams, memory easing out of breath, rhythms

  gliding in & out, over & under

  like birds—footprints in white snow—

  banking down sunset skies

  & now your love call coming through

  clear, the night wind’s sucking deep mystery

  through space, black distance collapsing in

  on itself, screaming, the grip

  of your sonorous name, soothing

  soothing, tongue touch, your sonorous name

  A POEM FOR OJENKE & K. CURTIS LYLE

  if in a comatose instant of deep listening

  you should come across a syllable

  wide as the sky of pure hearing & sleep

  as whenever anytime your eyes carry themselves

  to their limits of recognition, crystal

  as on a steel blue day of bright clear winter

  at the moment of that rare clarity

  as in the listening to a black, blues band there

  steeped in the bone & blood utterance of gut-bucket

  bucket of blood tradition, if in the stop-action

  freezing of that negative

  snapped image heard & fashioned there

  from that sound you just perceived now in the knowing

  of that terror, just now, there, guttural

  as in the whiskey-broken voice life of ma rainey

  chained to microscopic grooving of a vinyl instance

  recorded then full of all things considered

  meaningful there—then, as now—

  what it all means when everything is left

  hanging out there in the cold, like blood-splattered

  sheets billowing under a lolling blue morning

  cool rinse that now switches up

  under a chameleon sun’s heat, now, like cynical

  laughter, sweating down rivers of gold light

  beamed there, & if in the rifle sighting

  focusing of that clearly cold instant,

  comatosed, you should happen across a syllable

  wide as the sky of new hearing & blue deep

  blue deep, as where anytime your vision carries

  itself to the limits of recognition

  if you should hear a crystal song ringing out

  there, & during that moment of rare clarity

  a voice, perhaps, a note, like a breeze fluting over

  informing this moment, perhaps, like a cool blue morning

  rinsed, folding over a beginning poem there

  & in the crystal clear hearing of that moment

  & in the bone & blood spirit of gut-bucket blues

  tradition, & if you should hear a new crystal image

  there, call me with a poem, good brothers

  call me & singing, call me through a poem

  SOUTHERN LYRIC; RITUAL

  evenings rise here with voices of old people

  whispering up sky, a cat-eyed moon riding

  wings of bat syllables rising

  brushing up against mystery, eyelids of language

  winking their hushing rhythms through serenading trees

  xylophones carrying cooling winds to memory

  couch their soothing sounds in magic of primeval wisdom

  the orchestration of harmony between ensembles of birds

  whose voices whisper riffings up steep skies

  carrying history a lynx-eyed moon rides up on

  rising, like muted tongues of old people

  ventriloquists of southern nights

  whispering, there on porches

  cobwebbed in filigreed shadows

  half light, the old peoples’ voices

  yeasting with wisdom in their sundown

  eyes, riding up sky, longside a lynx-

  eyed moon, wings of bat syllables

  soothing, a xylophone, a tune

  PASSING ON THE LEGACY

  for my son Quincy Brandon Troupe & Henry Dumas

  we stand within these bones

  of ourselves within

  flesh of these years melting

  like ice cubes in drinks

  within stone these thoughts

  this miracles of roots inside

  our folklore the link

  stretching four hundred years

  back to villages eaten black

  by euro-american halloween flames

  eating up the dark rhythms rhythms

  eating up the dark rhythms, rhythms

  here, weaving shadows dance

  through leaves stretch to hear

  across salt water the boogieman high

  in trees the drummers harden hands

  & time breaks wind & bone

  stone juxtaposed next to feathers

  & there aren’t too many secrets

  these days that are not known we speak

  through our eyes

  & see through our ears & hear

  through our tongues

  we stand within tone of these bones

  inside these years ringing like bells

  a coltrane solo solo

  & so eye reach out the smile

  of my tongue blue-black with blues rhythms

  a jazz-riff born of dues payments

  to you a love gong

  chiming from my eyes

  hand over to you this signature

  born in blood & fire

  & baptized in river-bottoms

  a sun toned hardness

  a guitar full of lives

  so take the vision brandon

  & run up sun with it

  look back into your own eyes

  you are the memory

  carrying the future

  NEW YORK CITY STREAM POEM

  sounds sounds of crushed traffic

  wind sounds   sounds

  symphonic voices of multi-lingual people

  of new york city people   moving

  through space   pace

  of kinetic energy

  energy of space/place

  of new york city space/place

  a pickpocket of energy new york giving energy

  city space/place

  space/place of music   colors

  energy of music   colors & sounds weaving motion

  rhythm guitar   dancers of sound

  motion

  & faces odd cold beautiful faces

  & legs & figures that burst out of colors

  races

  traces of races that move beyond races colors that

  fuse & blues the only language we know hear

  faces sensuous faces

  faces with lips that invite   sounds

  they are succulent

  they are very very succulent

  these sounds  these colors

  these lips that invite

  colors   traces of races

  in the fused shadow world leaping

  from faces  lips that invite

  sounds colors of sound

  color me sound color me motion color me

  wind sound motion

  color me poem

  color me African wind poem

  color me music

  color me African freedom music

  color me black

  color me traces of races

  bursting from colors moving beyond races

  color me faces sensuous faces

  lips that invite

  color me energy

  color me voodoo/hoodoo

  space/place of energy

  color me motion moving

  color me love color me love

  color me hoodoo/voodoo

  traces of races in love

  color me love

  AT THE END

  at the end

  of every sentence

  a period

  occupying space

  as molecular energy

  a point to make

  another point

  in space the end is

  the beginning

  of another end

  recurring cycles

  occupying space

  & death being

  only a period at the

  end of a sentence

  earth

  a point

  that starts

  another point

  & at the end

  there is space

  to begin again

  always space

  at the end to

  begin again

  from

  WEATHER REPORTS

  NEW POEMS 1984–1990

  PERENNIAL RITUAL

  for all the dictators in Haiti & anywhere else

  they are killing the joy of laughter once again

  they’re slaughtering the smiles of children

  they’re banning the music from language once again

  they are marching in goose-steps to rhythm of bullets

  they’re putting cyanide in people’s drinks of hope again

  they are trading back their freedom for strings of puppet money

  they’re digging mass graves for the innocent once more

  they’re cutting down trees that hold back the floods

  they’re macheteing roots of their bloodlines once again

  they’re smearing blood on their mother’ faces dead as moats

  they’re ripping out the tongues from their history again

  they’re butchering all love like they would a goat

  what is it that they hate in themselves, in clear, new mirrors

  what is the dry as bone spit of their snake-eyed fear, their terror

  of bloodlines, running deep as the secrets of voodoo

  what is the future they want everyone to dance through

  where did the poison come from that is flowing through their puffer-fish

  hearts & where do their thoughts turn to after uzis shoot joy from the dark

  & the eerie silent roads hold only the shadows of murderers

  bufo marinus namphy, sweating beneath his tunics medalled with skulls

  his henchmen sitting black stone-faced behind him with their slit cobra eyes

  cool & evil prosper avril & william regala, lafontant & old bossman, duvalier

  what is the is the suicidal urge they pick up from other scumbags

  licking out their lizard tongues cancerous with warts

  their dum-dum, bazooka eyes of mamba snakes

  deadly as a fart at a republican party, whose american president keeps them

  stumbling here with his famous soft shoe, his chicken neck flapping clues

  his glued hair plastered in place, embodying what they will sink to

  what they will kill for to become

  O, they’re shooting out the lights of port-au-prince once again

  they’re turning people into zombies with their snake-eye guns

  they’re trying to kill the moon in a dreamer’s eyes once more

  they’re feeding the vacant-eyed poor with teaspoons half-filled with garbage

  they’re lining up beggars & killing their hunger again

  they are goose-stepping to the rhythm of bullets

  BOOMERANG: A BLATANTLY POLITICAL POEM

  eye use to write poems about burning

  down the motherfucking country for crazy

  horse, geronimo & malcolm king

  x, use to (w)rite about stabbing white folks

  in their air-conditioned eyeballs with ice picks

  cracking their sagging balls with sledgehammer blows

  now, poems leap from the snake-tip of my tongue

  bluesing a language twisted tighter than braided hope

  hanging like a limp-noosed rope down the question mark

  back of some coal miner’s squaw, her razor slanted

  killer shark eyes swollen shut with taboos

  she thought she heard & knew

  the sun in a voice looking like bessie smith’s severed arm

  on that mississippi back road, screaming, like a dead man’s son

  who had to watch his old man eat his own pleading heart

  & sometimes eye wonder if it’s worth the bother

  of it all, these poems eye (w)rite holding

  language percolating & shaped

  into metaphoric rage

  underneath, say

  a gentle simile, like a warm

  spring day, soft as balm or talcum

  on the edge of a tornado that hits quicker

  than the flick of a bat’s wing nicking the eye

  eye use to write poems about killing fools like ronald reagan

  duffy duck grinning off 30 million sucked down

  the whirlpooling black holes of cia space

  director casey taking a lobotomy

  hit, slash to protect

  the gipper

  dumb

  motherfuckers

  everywhere tying bombs

  to their own tongues, lighting fuses

  of staged events that lye of peace & saving

  money in the s & l pirateering, like president gipper

  they are metaphors for all that’s wrong in america right now, all this

  cloning, brouhaha, paid mouthpieces on wall street & the gipper

  giving frying skillet speeches, others that ray gun reagan

  ray gunning america, now, cannibalizing airwaves

  with mouthpieces fronting slimy churches

  building up humongous bank accounts

  in the name of the holy bones

  of jesus christ, long gone

  & dead

  & it is a metaphor

  boomeranging jimmy

  & tammy bakker, sleazy swaggert

  vacuuming pocketbooks of the old & the dead

  like medusa meese heads nicked off & sluicing like bad faith

  they dangle heads from “freedom fighter” mouths

  tell the black bird press herded up on a wire

  that it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay

  & them believing it

  eye use to write poems about burning

  down the motherfucking country for crazy

  horse, geronino & malcolm king

  x marks the spot where “coons” signed away

  their lives on dotted lines, black holes

  sucking away their breath

  for a sack of cotton

  full of woe

  eye

  sit here

  now, (w)riting

  poems of the soft

  calm beauty welling

  in my son’s innocent 4 year

  old eyes, thinking, perhaps of the time

  when this rage will strike him, driving him towards madness